Chicago Booth Review Podcast What the Right and Left Get Wrong About Gun Violence

Jens Ludwig: If violence really were a deterministic outcome of poverty, India would be one of the most violent countries in the world, and that's not the case.

When you look at the data, the murder rate in India is dramatically lower than it is in the United States. And I can promise you, there is not less poverty in India than there is in the United States.

Hal Weitzman: The United States has more guns than people; 400 million firearms for a population of 330 million. This American exceptionalism means that while the US is home to just 4% of the global population, it accounts for half of all the world's civilian firearms. And the United States has one of the world's highest rates of gun homicide, particularly compared to other high-income countries.

What's really driving America's appalling murder rate? Is it bad people, poverty, or something else? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman. And today, I'm talking with Jens Ludwig, a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and director of the University of Chicago's Crime Lab.

His new book is Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence. Ludwig thinks America's failure to tackle gun violence stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about what causes this in the first place. He uses the lens of behavioral economics to rethink why gun violence occurs and how to address it. So what are we getting wrong and what's really causing so much gun violence? Jens Ludwig, welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Jens Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me on, this is great.

Hal Weitzman: You have written this fantastic book, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence. Which although it's a heavy topic, I have to say congratulations on the book, because it's a real easy read and very entertaining, if I can say that. And very fun, even though it doesn't seem that the topic would be. And we learn a lot about you and we learn a lot about Chicago and your work. So maybe we can start with a bigger picture, though. Let's start by talking about where we are in terms of gun violence. We know that the US gun homicide rate far outstrips any other developed country, but it's also true, isn't it, that the US murder rate has fallen in the past few years? It spiked during COVID. So give us some context about the US right now versus the rest of the world and then what's going on within the US.

Jens Ludwig: Yeah. So there's always some up and down in the homicide rate in the United States. That's the one constant is inconstancy. But even amidst the up and down, the United States is just completely off the charts compared to any other rich country in the world. Our murder rate is multiple, multiple times what you see even in developed countries that you don't think of as being particularly well-run. Places like Turkey, for instance, have murder rates that are dramatically lower than ours.

Hal Weitzman: And Turkey, I remember from your book, has a relatively high rate.

Jens Ludwig: Yeah. Relative to other rich countries, Turkey is an outlier, but we are really an outlier compared to Turkey. And almost all of the difference in murder rates between the United States and these other rich countries is due to murders with guns.

Hal Weitzman: Right, okay. So you're saying that although the murder rate has come down, it's not very significant. It will-

Jens Ludwig: We still have this American exceptionalism, yeah.

Hal Weitzman: If it reverts, it will revert up again. Okay. So the heart of your book or the first part of your book is about how both the left, if I can call them that, and the right. Or the dominant narratives. It doesn't necessarily correlate directly to left and right.

Jens Ludwig: I don't even know what left and right mean anymore, yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Correct. Okay, so let's forget about politics. The two dominant narratives, one which tends to be more conservative, is about what our president, Donald Trump, has called bad hombres, basically. Some people are bad, and that's why we have people killing each other. Or, the more liberal version of that is that there's poor social conditions. Poor neighborhoods have much higher instance of gun crime, so one person you cite who subscribes to that view in your book is the late Chicago mayor, Harold Washington, from the 1980s and also Arnie Duncan who was education secretary, wasn't he, under Barrack Obama. So, both of these you reject. What's flawed about both of these conventional views?

Jens Ludwig: I think the bad hombre perspective leads you to think that these are people who aren't afraid of whatever the criminal justice system is going to do to them. That leads you to think that the only thing that you can do is dis incentivize gun violence by threatening people with bigger criminal justice sticks. The other side that you think it's all about bad economic conditions. That leads you to think the only thing that you can do is dis incentivize gun violence by making the alternatives to crime more appealing, jobs programs or a more generous social safety net.

Notice for starters, one thing that both of those conventional wisdoms have in common, which is the implicit assumption that before anybody pulls a trigger they're doing some sort of premeditated deliberate weighing of pros and cons, that is they're thinking about the consequences of what they're about to do. And that turns out to be not what most shootings in America are. If you look at the data, most shootings are actually crimes of passion, not crimes of profit recognizing that rage is one of the most powerful of all human passions. So they're arguments that go sideways and they end in tragedy because someone's got a gun. Those are not the sort of events that wind up being very responsive to incentives. It's a big deal because for 100 years our whole policy approach has been about how do we change the incentives for gun violence. It's like trying to treat cancer with heart medication, no wonder we haven't made more progress.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, so let's just try and diagnose it though before we get to the solution. I understand the point about the battle embrace. You are saying that that's not actually. These are crimes of passion, so that it's not that people make a calculation. And so it's not going to be a disincentive. We cannot create a good disincentive because the incentive was misunderstood in the first place, correct?

Jens Ludwig: Yeah. Please go ahead.

Hal Weitzman: No, I was going to say so then the other one I'm not quite getting, so explain that more about the economic conditions. What are the incentives there that you're saying are wrong?

Jens Ludwig: Yeah, so we're right in the heart of University of Chicago economics world. And the key figure in this whole way of thinking about crime was out former University of Chicago colleague, Gary Becker.

Hal Weitzman: Legend, right?

Jens Ludwig: Legend. And so his view about this is that whenever anybody is thinking about whether they're going to engage in crime of not they're thinking about the benefits of engaging in crime versus the costs of engaging in crime. And the cost of engaging in crime includes the opportunity cost of crime. What would my life look like if I wasn't engaging in this criminal act? And that includes things like what are my earnings opportunities in the legal labor market?

Hal Weitzman: So the argument is basically you've got nothing to lose.

Jens Ludwig: Exactly. If I'm unemployed and unemployable, I basically have nothing to lose, and so why not then ...

Hal Weitzman: So the argument would be the poorer I am the more likely I am to commit a gun crime.

Jens Ludwig: Yeah. And that's been basically the Gary Becker formalized that, but you can go back to the 1930s and see the Republicans and the Democrats were arguing with one another in the '30s about bigger criminal justice sticks versus bigger carrots.

Hal Weitzman: Right. And the reason ... First of all, I'm interested in Gary Becker because you were here when Gary Becker was alive. Did you talk to Gary Becker about your work because your work is here at the crime lab at the University of Chicago. Was he interested in your work? Did you challenge him on this assumption?

Jens Ludwig: No. I got to know him very early in our work at the crime lab, and my thinking has really shifted over time as I've learned more about this, and so that was ... I didn't have the chance to talk about that with him. I will just very quickly mention my canonical Gary Becker moment. He was a discussant on a paper of mine at some conference in London, and so I was frantically finishing this up to send it to Gary Becker. First of all, I thought I can't believe I'm going to e-mail Gary Becker. Already seemed sort of crazy. I finished the paper at like 10:00 on Sunday. I e-mail it to Gary, and he e-mails back at 10:02 and he says, "I'm really looking forward to reading it." And I thought, "Give me a Nobel prize and make me 80 years old and I'm not going to be working at 10:02 on Sunday night," but that's why Gary Becker was Gary Becker, I guess.

Hal Weitzman: Absolutely, okay. It's a shame we didn't get a chance to challenge him, though. I wonder what his response would've been. Your whole analysis is informed by behavioral economics.

Jens Ludwig: Yeah, maybe to just extend this line of thinking, Steve Levitt read the book and Steve really liked it, and I think one-

Hal Weitzman: Steve Levitt, just explain, of course another famous U Chicago economist.

Jens Ludwig: Steve Levitt, one of our other former University of Chicago economics colleagues, also he would spend a lot of time with Gary when he was here and also very, very much Chicago school. I think one way to think about the argument that I'm making in the book is I am not challenging the idea that incentives matter. What I'm doing is I'm saying for this behavior incentives don't seem to matter as much as we would think, if that makes sense. Because it's like for property offending, property crime really does seem to be very sensitive to changes in incentives. So it's not that the idea that people are rational sometimes and respond to incentives. There really is something to that. The argument of the book is this particular behavior seems to be something that is made in a frame of mind that is not very conducive to change by carrots and sticks.

Hal Weitzman: And you're also not saying that there aren't bad hombres, just that-

Jens Ludwig: And I'm definitely not saying ... Something like 1% of all American men are psychopaths according to the psychology psychiatric community in all walks of life, and they're over-represented in our prisons. And so there are definitely people who are fundamentally different from the rest of us, and if we let them out of prison they're going to hurt other people. There's just no alternative. But I think the data suggests that the large majority of people who are engaging in crime, even the most serious sorts of crimes like gun violence are not psychopaths. They're just normal people who in a very difficult situation wind up making a bad decision.

Hal Weitzman: I'm curious about your journey because you have this great line in the book. You're quoting someone saying, "Nothing stops a bullet like a job." And you used to hold that view, like you said. When did it change? How did it change?

Jens Ludwig: One of the real light bulb moments for me on this was reading, of all things, I'm an economist but I found myself reading the wonderful book by Jane Jacobs from many years ago called, The Death and Life of Great American Cities where she's talking about ... Jane Jacobs was a journalist and then a very famous urban planner, and she's talking about living on Hudson Street in Greenich Village in Manhattan and looking around Manhattan and seeing that there are similarly poor neighborhoods that differ dramatically in their rates of crime and violence. And that for starters Jane Jacobs' argument was similarly poor neighborhoods can be very different with respect to the presence of eyes on the street, people out and about who are willing to step in and intervene and exert the academic jargony term for it is informal social control. So people just trying to keep their neighborhood safe and calm and everything.

And that got me to really start wondering if that's true for Manhattan in 1960 is it also true for Chicago in 20215. And so I started to look at the data here in Chicago, and it turns out to be just as true in Chicago in 2025 as it was back then. And interestingly, it's just as true at the country level as well. You can see ... Here's one way to think about it. If violence really were a deterministic outcome of poverty, India would be one of the most violent countries in the world. And that's not the case. When you look at the data, the murder rate in India is dramatically lower than it is in the United States. And I can promise you there is not less poverty in India than there is in the United States.

Hal Weitzman: But if you go to a country like India, do you see more violence in poor parts of India in poor parts of big cities, let's say?

Jens Ludwig: One way to think about it is a much larger share of India consists of poor parts than in the United States. And so if poverty really was the key driver of violence on its own, you should see an overall average murder rate in India that's dramatically higher than what you see in the US, and that's not what you see.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Tell me about when did you come to that conclusion?

Jens Ludwig: This was a fact in the data that really threw me. As an economist I had read Gary Becker. That made a big impression on me as it did everybody else in the field. And so then I started to dig into what the research literature ... That's a striking finding that makes you wonder what's actually going on. One of the big advances in economics is the ability to use data to move from correlation to causation and isolate the effects of specific social factors on the outcomes that we care about. And it turns out that there's a huge research literature looking at the causal effects of jobs programs for people leaving prison, social programs for people leaving prison, social programs for everybody in the general population, studies that look at what happens when overall economic conditions get better or worse.

And the overwhelming conclusion that you get from looking at those studies, surprisingly at least to me initially was that putting more money in people's pockets does not ... It makes people better off, which is super important in its own right, obviously. It reduces people's risk of involvement in property crime, which is also really great. But it doesn't generate the tripole benefit of also reducing people's involvement in violent crime. I think once you think about what violent crime is, that starts to make more sense. If it's arguments where people are just not thinking clearly, if you've read the wonderful Danny Conoman book, Thinking Fast and Slow, when the slow thinking that we all engage in to the extent to which we are able to be deliberate and rational that's our slow thinking but that's very effortful. So our minds are designed to do as much fast thinking, automatic below the level of consciousness as possible, those automatic thoughts are ones that are adaptive. They're automatic responses that are adaptive to things that we see over and over again in our daily lives, which usually work well for us but not always.

I think that's really what's driving us in these sorts or arguments rather than some consideration of, "Oh, if I do this I'm going to lose my paycheck." In the moment you're just not thinking about consequences or really thinking deliberately at all for the most part.

Hal Weitzman: Jens Ludwig, in the first part of this episode we talked about your book and what people get wrong, essentially, about the psychology, the incentives that drive gun crime and the consequences that flow from that. We talked about Gary Becker and how people who commit violent gun crime do not sit down and do a cost benefit analysis, is it worth it to shoot this person and possibly kill them and all the consequences. They do it because of, most of them I think you said in the book 80% of murders are crimes of passion, correct? Let's talk because you are pretty harsh on the media in this book. Given that I used to be a daily journalist and now still consider what we do here at Chicago Booth Review to be journalism, I want to defend us a little bit or understand at least what you're accusing us of.

We, and I talk about the media in general, are we fueling these misconceptions with our reporting? And if so what is it exactly that's going wrong there?

Jens Ludwig: I think the media plays an important role in the development of conventional wisdom that misunderstands gun violence, but I don't mean it in a blamey sort of way. I think what the media is doing makes perfect sense to me. It just has this-

Hal Weitzman: Unfortunate effect.

Jens Ludwig: It has this unhelpful side effect. And so the business of the media is not to inform people about exactly what's going on. It's to attract attention. And so what are the sorts of gun violence events that are most likely to attract attention. As I said in the previous episode, 80% of shootings are arguments that end in tragedy because someone's got a gun. You said something dumb about my wife, I pull out a gun and shoot you at the movie theater, does not make a gripping five-part HBO special or Netflix special. It doesn't make for a particularly interesting long form series of articles that play out day-after-day in the newspaper. That's like a three-sentence some idiot pulls out a gun and shoots some other idiot at the movie theater. No wonder that that doesn't get much coverage.

In contrast, when you think about some of the tragedies that we've had here at the University of Chicago, masters student in statistics graduates and then is shot and killed in a terrible robbery right off campus. That was a national or even international news story because it is so unusual to have someone from that sort of background involved in gun violence you can understand why it gets so much attention.

As another example, something like 10 or 20% of the shootings in Chicago, if that, are motivated by gangs fighting over drug selling turf. Particularly on the West Side, the heroin highway of the 290 Eisenhower Express coming out of downtown of the western suburbs. When the Federal Government takes down one of those drug selling gangs and prosecutes them in a racketeering case that is on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. There's a three-week trial, and it is gripping news coverage the whole time. The media is doing that because that's what people are interested in reading about. That's much more interesting than an argument-related shooting. But it has the side effect of getting people to think that gun violence is much more deliberate than it actually is, and it's much more motivated by [inaudible 00:19:53].

Hal Weitzman: And of course we think of tragedies like school shootings. And those are pre-meditated often. Someone, not perhaps quite a cost benefit analysis, but they're doing some kind of thought process involved as premeditated. So they're pointing at the stuff that's interesting, but it's interesting because it's irregular, and it doesn't really explain the phenomenon. Is that right?

Jens Ludwig: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And so then when we're trying to understand what the determinants of gun violence are, we're trying to explain what we're seeing in the media all the time rather than trying to explain what the huge majority of shootings actually are.

Hal Weitzman: Let's talk about that. What is going on when there's a crime of passion? You started to talk about [inaudible 00:20:39] and this idea what what I think is called system one and system two, system one being the quick behaviors that we don't think about very much that we need to do in order to get around day-to-day and system two being things that we should be thinking about and doing more of a cost benefit analysis.

Jens Ludwig: Yeah exactly.

Hal Weitzman: Say how that relates to your thinking about gun violence.

Jens Ludwig: One thing that I would just say is the national conversation is sort of misunderstood, gun violence and what to do about it, but the front line practitioners who are working on this problem every day have seen this problem very clearly. I think one of the light bulb moments for me is I was in the juvenile detention center here in Chicago on the West Side on Roosevelt Road talking. This is where the juvenile justice system holds the kids that they think are highest risk as they're awaiting trial. And I was talking to a staff leader there who said to me, "Most of these kids I tell them if I could give you back just 10 minutes of your lives none of you would be here." And that helps you see what the bulk of the problem really is. It's not morally bad people, it's not bad economic conditions from the perspective of gun violence, it's normal people making bad decisions in super difficult situations.

So then if you're thinking about what we can go about this you need to understand what are people doing during those difficult 10-minute windows. The thinking that we normally think of is thinking the deliberate voice in your head. That's slow thinking. That's what Danny Conellman and his wonderful book, Thinking Fast and Slow, calls system two. That's super mentally taxing, and so most of our cognition, most of our thinking is actually done below the level of consciousness, fast thinking designed to give us as quick and coherent a picture of what's going on as possible. But effortlessness and speed don't come for free. Nothing comes for free. One of the key lessions of economics is everything in life is trade-offs. And one of the trade-offs with relying on this sort of fast thinking below the level of consciousness is it's right a lot of the time but not always.

And so we can all make mistakes with that fast thinking that for you and I in Hyde Park the consequences of making a system one mistake aren't necessarily that extreme, but if you're a 16-year-old kid living in a neighborhood where there are lots of gangs, drugs, and guns making a system one mistake can have really terrible consequences, hence the title of the book, Unforgiving Places.

Hal Weitzman: Right. I want to take a slight detour there where you talk about gangs because it's not really about gangs. People sometimes outside Chicago have this perception that Chicago is gangland where there's gangs shooting out on the corners. It's not really that, is it?

Jens Ludwig: No, it's not really that. Very little of the violence turns out to be like my gang is trying to retake that drug selling corner. I think there's a widespread sense that the gangs do play an important role in a way that you might not expect, which is helping get guns into the hands of kids. You're a 16-year-old kid on the south side of Chicago. There are no gun stores in Chicago. You can't go to a gun store yourself and buy a gun. How to guns get in the hands of 16-year-old kids. And I think gangs might play a role in that, but then how the kids use them is where getting into these arguments and ...

Hal Weitzman: That's fascinating because how the guns get into people's hands seems to me to be huge, and that's what I wanted to ask you about. From an outside perspective, I'm British, you were born in Europe.

Jens Ludwig: I was born in Germany, yeah.

Hal Weitzman: So then if you have that sensibility. But from an outside perspective, what you notice about America, what seems to be driving that is just the availability. Like you say, we all have out moments when we fly into a rage, and you recount in the book several times when you've been in that situation.

Jens Ludwig: Embarrassingly so.

Hal Weitzman: And nothing ... We have to read the book to find out more. You even say at one point, "Thank God I didn't have a gun at that moment." So there's a quote that struck me from your book, it's not that a gun causes altercations, but placing a gun in the middle of an argument greatly increases the chances that someone winds up dead. So it does seem to me that what makes a place unforgiving, which is the title of your book, is the availability of guns. And you quote this statistic that 50% more guns on the streets it's estimated that that would double the number of shootings. And more people die from self-inflicted gunshot wounds than from homicides in America. So why isn't the book all about availability, which is something that I understand has been talking about a lot, and as you recount not much has been done. But why don't you focus on the availability rather than the psychology.

Jens Ludwig: Yeah. I think it's because I started my career studying gun control and gun regulations, and then I stopped because I just got too depressed. There's just so little movement in gun regulation in the United States, I have come to characterize myself as almost a pathological pragmatist. And it's such a heartbreaking problem in Chicago and every other American city, and also in many ways like an existential threat to these cities. Steve Levitt who we mentioned before, former University of Chicago colleague, wrote a paper showing that every murder reduces the city's population by 70 people. That's one of the important reasons why Chicago has lost a million people since 1950.

The reason that the book is not all about guns is because there's just not much that we can do about that in the foreseeable future. There are 400 million guns in America for a country of 330 million people. We're all looking at the same headlines out of Washington, DC. There are not going to be big changes in national gun laws any time soon. The good news, I think the optimistic argument that the book makes is that, and this is another way to interpret the quote that you read, gun violence equals guns plus violence. And so it's not just about gun availability. It's also about the willingness of people to use guns to hurt other people.

And so if you had a button that you could push to make the 400 million guns in America go away, all the data suggests that that would make the country much safer. Nobody has that button, so what else can we do. And I think the book argues that there's an optimistic conclusion here that there are two ways to solve this problem, not just one, and kind of a second best approach at the very least lets see if we can do as much as we can to reduce the willingness of people to use guns to hurt one another.

Hal Weitzman: So your argument is essentially given our lack of progress on tackling gun availability there are still other things we can do to address the problem.

Jens Ludwig: That's exactly right.

Hal Weitzman: Well, I want to make sure that we have you back on the Chicago Booth Review podcast to talk about the solutions to gun violence in another episode. For the moment, Jens Ludwig, thank you very much for coming on the Chicago Booth Review podcast.

Jens Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me on. This is great.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis, and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research.

This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.